Dossier 14: Co-creation with AI

In 2022 the metaverse seemed like the next big thing, but as we make our way into 2023 it looks like AI is on everyone’s minds. Since June 2022, AI image generators, like Craiyon, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E, have become available to a wide audience. We ended 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, an exponentially popular advanced AI chatbot that helps us write code, makes crochet patterns, and tries to convince us to end our marriages. In light of these rapid developments in AI technology, what does it mean to co-create with AI? How will this change our understanding of authorship? And how will these tools shape and reconfigure our daily lives?

In this dossier, which will be released over the course of several months, we’ll be exploring these questions. In our first article we asked a few (anonymous) users of ChatGPT about how they were using it in their work and personal lives. In our second piece for this series, Margarita Osipian interviewed creative technologist Babusi Nyoni about how he’s been using GPT-2 and ChatGPT in his work over the years. Take a read through Mariana Fernández Mora’s reflections on her relationship to technology, co-writing her thesis with AI, and surviving and thriving in a machine-saturated world. In this dossier’s image contribution, Matthew C. Wilson uses images produced by Midjourney to take us into the realm of bio-engineering, ‘generative’ AI, and the quiet transformation of biological life. We interview Nadia Piet, founder of AIxDesign, about the current state of AI and how to build the AI futures that we want to see. And writer and post-conceptual artist Alina Lupu takes us on a dark and humorous doom-scroll through the latest AI news entangling the worlds of cultural work and labour.